Commercial and operational strategy for large-scale fiber roll-out – 2018/19

Challenge

The client was a European incumbent telecommunications operator, with a large portion of the company’s fixed infrastructure (copper and coax based) overbuilt by competitors’ fiber, putting the company’s market share at risk. Altman Solon was engaged to help the company define and implement a commercial and operational strategy for a large-scale fiber roll-out.

Solution

The Altman Solon approach consisted of four workstreams that together have helped to shape the client’s “Fiber Factory.”

The commercial strategy focused on assessing the competitive arena and identifying promising deployment clusters, resulting in a short-to-long-term deployment pipeline. In addition, we helped to define the commercial product proposition towards retail service providers and housing associations. In the network deployment strategy, we helped to define the future network architecture of the FTTH network and assessed efficient deployment processes. We also helped to define the go-to-market strategies for both NetCo and OpCo, establishing several phases of communication with the potential individual and institutional customers (before, during and after the fiber deployment), as well as a precise week-based timeline, sourcing, and operationalisation initiatives of the plan.

In addition, we quantified the overall fiber plan by developing business plans both on a group level as well as on the NetCo and OpCo level.

Results

Altman Solon has provided the client with a comprehensive strategy for the short-, mid-, and long-term implementation including the preparation of roll-out pilots. We then helped to kick-start the operations and ensured the “Fiber Factory” was ready to deliver on the first roll-out clusters. Our implementation support ranged from launching a sourcing program for trans-European contractors, establishing processes around area selection, developing a contractors’ capacity planning tool, and supporting the operationalisation of the go-to-market approach.